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Monsanto
Caves to Activists on Biotech Wheat
Friday, May 14, 2004
By Steven Milloy
Is it better to feed the poor and make money,
or appease Greenpeace and
do neither?
Biotech giant Monsanto's management faced that very question this week
and opted to cave in to Greenpeace. It's another example of craven
shortsighted corporate managers surrendering to pressure from
anti-business activist groups to the detriment of corporate
shareholders and the public.
Monsanto announced this week that it was "shelving" plans to
commercialize its genetically engineered wheat. The company denied
succumbing to activist pressure in scrapping plans for the first
biotech wheat, claiming instead that hard-nosed business calculations
forced the decision. Monsanto's spin was that the initial market
targeted (spring wheat acreage in North America) had shrunk by 25
percent since research on biotech wheat began in 1997 and that its
grower-customers are divided on whether to use the technology.
Greenpeace had a quite different take on Monsanto's decision. "It's a
hard-won victory for every environmental group, every consumer, every
cyberactivist who has said 'no' to genetically engineered foods. The
decision fits a pattern of industry retreat set last month by Bayer
CropScience's (search) decision to withdraw GE maize from the UK," said
Greenpeace.
Some growers may indeed be concerned about biotech wheat -- but only
because Greenpeace and the rest of the anti-biotechnology/anti-business
axis did a better job of scaring farmers, food processors and consumers
about the technology than Monsanto did in selling it. After all,
there are no health, safety or ecological reasons for concern about
biotech wheat. It was headed for regulatory approval. Now it's headed
for the scrap heap as development has been "deferred for four to eight
years," according to Monsanto management.
Biotech wheat wasn't the only beneficial technology canned by Monsanto
this week. The company also decided to close down its genetically
modified canola operations in Australia -- once again thanks to
anti-technology fear mongering. Greenpeace anti-GM campaigner Jeremy
Tager celebrated by telling Australian media, "Effectively there is not
going to be a commercial release of GM canola and to have defeated that
is pretty extraordinary."
Whatever short-term gains Monsanto management thinks it may reap from
its retreat on biotech wheat, they do not outweigh the long-term damage
done.
First, agricultural biotechnology is a key component of any serious
plan for feeding our planet's ever-growing population. Biotechnology
can help produce more and better quality agricultural products in a
cost-effective and environmentally sound manner. But Monsanto's
corporate management has just sacrificed two new and beneficial
agricultural technologies simply because of its own stunning failure to
defend its product against pressure from the lunatics at Greenpeace.
Such appeasement only encourages anti-technology activists, whose goal
is not to ensure that only "safe" biotech crops are developed, but to
make sure that no biotech crops are planted at all. Don't think that
Greenpeace's anti-technology activism is limited to agricultural
biotechnology. They oppose many technologies, including, of all things,
plastic intravenous (IV) bags because of the chemicals used in their
production.
Monsanto's decision on canola "certainly puts us behind the eight-ball
and sends a bad signal to anyone wanting to invest in new technologies
... ," the head of the Grains Council of Australia said to Reuters.
It used to be that all technologies had to do to achieve societal
acceptance was to work and work safely. Do they also now need to be
approved by activist groups whose basic premise is that technological
advances are bad? Who appointed them as guardians of the public good?
The activist-to-corporate management decision-making route is also
alarming because of its backdoor nature -- it circumvents our public
political and regulatory processes.
If Greenpeace and Monsanto's wobbly-kneed management get to decide what
agricultural biotechnology can be commercialized, then why have a Food
and Drug Administration, an Environmental Protection Agency or a
Department of Agriculture? There is no doubt that regulatory agencies
have their own set of problems, but at least they can be accountable
through the political process.
Make no mistake that Monsanto's appeasement sets a terrible precedent
for other biotech companies who want to develop new products. It
empowers the activists. It intimidates investors. It creates a chilling
effect throughout corporate America with management cowering at the
prospect of being the next company to be targeted by a baseless
activist campaign.
Regulation through aggressive activism coupled with wimpy corporate
management doesn't bode well for our political system or our economy.
It will hamper our ability to innovate and create jobs. It's a threat
to our entire free enterprise and free market system -- precisely the
targets of the left-leaning activists groups like Greenpeace.
Monsanto's shareholders can strike a blow for free enterprise by
sending a sharp message to CEO Hugh Grant -- "stand up for our
company's products and stop kowtowing to Greenpeace, or find a new
job."
Steven Milloy is
the publisher of JunkScience.com, an adjunct scholar
at the Cato Institute and the author of Junk Science Judo: Self-Defense
Against Health Scares and Scams (Cato Institute, 2001).
Anti-Meat
Activists Target School Lunches
Thursday, May 27, 2004
By Steven Milloy
A health scare over school lunches is brewing.
The driving forces behind the junk science-fueled scare are the usual
suspects -- anti-meat and environmental activist groups, and
politicians who do the groups' bidding.
I'm not going to criticize the groups and their politicians too much,
though. Scaring the public in hopes of furthering their twisted agenda
just seems to be what they do regardless of facts and any criticism
directed their way. I will, however, blame a corporation that,
ironically, isn't even involved with school lunch programs --
McDonald's.
For years now, activist groups such as the Center for Science in the
Public Interest, Union of Concerned Scientists Natural Resources
Defense Council and others have been trying to foment a scare about the
use of antibiotics in farm animals. The groups have allied themselves
under the banner of the Keep Antibiotics Working Campaign -- trying to
give the impression that they're concerned about a rise in bacterial
resistance to antibiotics used to treat humans.
This is, of course, utterly misleading.
To the extent there has been a rise in bacterial resistance to
antibiotics used to treat humans, this is overwhelmingly due to the
decades-old tendency of physicians to over-prescribe antibiotics.
Despite this well-known cause of the antibiotic resistance problem, the
Keep Antibiotics Working Campaign focuses solely on the use of
antibiotics in farm animals -- a practice not persuasively linked to
antibiotic resistance.
The simple facts are that the members of the campaign don't like
animals being raised for human consumption, they don't like the farmers
who raise the animals and they don't like the pharmaceutical companies
that help the farmers. Having little traction with scientists, the
activists necessarily have turned to like-minded politicians to advance
their cause -- Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., and Rep. Sherrod Brown,
D-Ohio.
Earlier this year, Sen. Clinton and Rep. Brown wrote to the secretary
of agriculture "inquiring" about the Department of Agriculture's plans
to implement some language in a Senate-House conference report -- not a
law, just some legislative commentary -- "strongly encouraging the
Secretary to work to ensure that no chicken purchased for the School
Lunch Program contains fluoroquinolones [a class of antibiotics used on
farm animals], including the initiation of a policy to not purchase
chickens for these programs from companies that do not have a stated
policy that they do not use fluoroquinolones in their chickens."
Not surprisingly, Sen. Clinton and Rep. Brown did not -- because they
could not -- reference any scientific basis for their requested ban on
chickens treated with fluoroquinolones. They did, however, cite as
precedent a recent announcement by McDonald's that the fast-food
purveyor would not accept meat from suppliers who treated their
chickens with fluoroquinolones.
McDonald's didn't have a scientific basis for its decision either,
citing instead its desire to cooperate with the activist group
Environmental Defense (part of the Keep Antibiotics Working Campaign)
and its "commitment to social responsibility" (whatever that is). But
that's not even the most outrageous part of the farce. Campylobacter,
the target bacteria for fluoroquinolones, is killed by freezing.
McDonald's doesn't sell fresh chicken -- only frozen chicken. So
there's no chance that fluoroquinolone-resistant campylobacter could be
passed along to consumers via McDonald's chicken offerings.
But wait, there's more. A report issued last year by the General
Accounting Office on food-borne illness outbreaks related to school
lunches indicated there was not a single outbreak of disease caused by
campylobacter -- the bacteria that this whole debate is about.
Moreover, even if there had been a school-lunch-associated
campylobacter outbreak, fluoroquinolones-resistance wouldn't be an
issue in any event since that class of antibiotics isn't generally used
to treat children under 18 years of age.
The only things accomplished by McDonald's decision to ban chickens
treated with fluoroquinolones were the appeasement of activists, and
becoming a bogus example in the Clinton-Brown letter to the USDA about
school lunches. McDonald's management may want us to think that it was
"socially responsible" by banning fluoroquinolone use by its meat
suppliers. But its actions do nothing to solve a problem that doesn't
even exist.
It appears that McDonald's management, in its dubious quest for
political correctness, hasn't given any of this any thought whatsoever.
That, particularly as it contributes to the school lunch scare, is more
"reprehensible" than "responsible."
Steven Milloy is the
publisher of JunkScience.com, an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute
and the author of Junk Science Judo: Self-Defense Against Health Scares
and Scams (Cato Institute, 2001).
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